My adventures in bladesmithing and luthiery, and other stuff. Prepare to be amazed. (Yawn).

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Guitar number 14

Just strung this one up this past week. It was an experimental guitar, in that, the body size is very small (it’s the same as my baritone uke body) and it has a Virzi plate in it. I wanted to make myself a small guitar for traveling, so this is it. It has a surprisingly big voice for such a small instrument. I’ll try to post a sound clip.

The back and sides are osage orange. Top is Lutz spruce. Neck is mahogany. Rosette is osage. So is bridge and bridge plate. Binding is curly maple. Bracing is standard X, but with another X below instead of the usual two diagonal bars. Scale length is 19-3/4″. 14 frets to the body, 19 frets total. I used a 28′ radius on the entire top. Nut width is 1-3/4″. String spacing at saddle is 2-1/8″.

When I first strung it up, I used medium gauge strings, and tuned it EADGBE, but I built it to be tuned ADGCEA, but I had to switch to extra light strings for that. It sounded good either way.